The U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs (the "Committee") heard testimony from various witnesses on Chair Mike Crapo's (R-IA) proposed framework for housing reform legislation. Released in February, the framework for reform would: protect taxpayers by reducing the too-big-to-fail risk posed by the current "duopoly of mortgage guarantors"; keep existing infrastructure in the housing finance system that works well, while increasing the role of private risk-bearing capital; create new layers of protection between mortgage credit risk and taxpayers; ensure a level playing

The U.S. Supreme Court found that an investment banker may be held legally responsible for disseminating statements that he knew to be false, even though he was not the "maker" of the false statements. The SEC charged an investment banker and his superior for violating Section 10(b) of the Exchange Act, Rule 10b-5 thereunder, and Securities Act Section 17, in the case of the superior, by making, and in the case of the charged investment banker, by disseminating, inaccurate statements to investors with "the intent to defraud." In 2017, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia

The CFTC determined that Australia's margin requirements for uncleared swaps are comparable in outcome to the CFTC's rules. The CFTC determination is generally for circumstances where substituted compliance applies under CFTC rules, and does not contain material conditions that would require partial compliance with U.S. rules. The relief does not extend to products that are "swaps" for U.S. purposes but out-of-scope for Australian purposes and, in such cases, an entity could not elect to comply with Australian requirements over CFTC requirements.

In a letter to the House Financial Services Committee, SIFMA expressed opposition to the " SEC Disclosure Effectiveness Testing Act," which would require the SEC to conduct investor testing of any retail disclosure document. SIFMA stated that while it favored the general concept of the bill, it opposed passage on the ground that the bill could: delay the implementation of rules intended to protect investors, including the SEC's pending Regulation Best Interest and the related proposal mandating the distribution of a Form Client Relationship Summary; and be interpreted to subject all current

The CFTC's Market Intelligence Branch in the Division of Market Oversight ("DMO") analyzed the impact of automated orders in the commodity futures market. The DMO staff studied international transactional data for 30 futures contracts over a period of approximately five years, comparing the effects of manual versus automated order placement on the futures market. The DMO staff found that: the percentage of automatically placed orders has gone up for all commodity futures markets; compared to manual orders, automated orders are typically smaller in size and their "resting times" are shorter